I am a self-professed Olympics lover. I get my love of the Olympics from my parents. My mom has always loved watching the gymnastics in the Summer Olympics and figure skating in the Winter Olympics. My sister is actually named after a skier my parents watched in the 1992 Albertville Winter Games. Whenever they come around, Winter or Spring, I have a mental countdown, and now with the advent of apps, an actual countdown. I religiously watch the Opening Ceremonies, no matter how long or drawn out they are. I cheer loudly and yell at the TV as if the athletes (and sometimes commentators) can hear me. This behavior is not exclusive to the Olympics, as I have been known to yell at baseball and any other sport I’m watching.

My earliest memory of actively watching the Olympic Games is from 1996 and watching the Magnificent 7 USA Women’s Gymnastics Team. I was 7 years old, and for a fleeting moment, I considered gymnastics as my future. Kerri Strug’s triumphant and painful vault is cemented in my mind, as is Dominique Moceanu’s incredible floor routine (at only age 14). That feeling of wanting to be a gymnast had vanished from my mind by the time the games were over. My love for the Games, however, was not. I found out that I shared the same birthday as Dominique Moceanu. I bought a book on her that I still have and actually read again last year. Two years later, I was enamored by Tara Lipinski, the pint-sized figure skater who beat out the “older veteran” skater Michelle Kwan, who was always wise beyond her years. Even at age 9, I could feel her heartbreak over her silver medal all the way in California from Nagano, Japan. I also have a book on the two of them and their Olympic journey. In 2000, the Sydney Summer Olympics once again captured all of my attention, except this time, I was drawn to swimming. I watched as Ian “Thorpedo” Thorpe and crew dashed the U.S. Men’s 4x100 relay team’s hopes of a gold medal and was equally in love and at war with the Thorpedo. How DARE the host country take gold in a sport that they were proud of?? I was hooked.

Four years later, the Athens Games came and Michael Phelps arrived as a 19 year old kid, competing in his second games. He started as a scrawny 15 year old in Sydney, who swam in the final for the 200m Butterfly, finishing fifth in the event that he would later dominate. In the interim, I had started playing water polo and joined the swim team at my high school. I loved the hell out of it. It was thrilling watching the 2004 Athens Games after becoming a swimmer myself. I had experienced a small slice of how hard training for a swim meet was, which made the magnitude of training for the Olympics huge. In his first final in Athens, Phelps broke the World Record (WR) in the 400 IM. He swam on the Bronze winning relay team for the 4x100 Free relay. He won six Gold medals and two Bronze at those games, falling one short of matching Mark Spitz’s record of seven Golds at one games. The speculation after Athens was that he would return to the 2008 Beijing Olympics to try for the record again.

I graduated high school in 2006 and stopped swimming - I was never going to be good enough to go further than the JV squad. I’m short (5’2”) and curvy. Not exactly a swimmer’s body type, right? But, during the summer of 2008, I was yelling and shouting at the TV in the wee hours of the morning to watch the swimming events live in Beijing. I was pushing for Phelps to match Spitz’s record. I jumped around and cheered with each victory. When he matched it and then BROKE it, I was as proud of him as I could be of any member of my own family. He was the greatest of all time and nothing was going to top that!

In college, I set myself on a career path in the giant umbrella of communications. At one point, I narrowed it down to a pipe dream of double majoring in Public Relations and Sports Management so that I could work for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) or the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Yep, I was set on moving to Lausanne, Switzerland to be a part of the greatest sporting event in the world (apologies to World Cup fans - that’s only one sport). Alas, my dream school didn’t work out, but I still tried. Once I transferred, I began an internship with the Bay Area Sports Organizing Committee (BASOC) - a committee whose mission it is to bring the Olympic Games to San Francisco. It’s been shut out of selection through 2024 at this point, but I still have hope that one day the Olympics will land in the Bay Area.

In joining BASOC, I got on board for the 2009 Summer National Senior Games, also known as the Senior Olympics. I was a media intern and we started in March, working in a small office for the whole summer, building stories out of the participants. The media team basically lived at Stanford University during the two weeks of competition in August 2009, reporting on all stats and stories that emerged. We even had a few former Olympians competing - most notably Gary Hall Sr. If the name sounds familiar and you’re in your 20s or 30s, you may be thinking of his son, Gary Hall Jr., who swam in three Olympics. He competed in the 50m event - the fastest all out sprint event of the Olympic program. It was an addictive feeling to be in the thick of it and having a hand in the organization of it.

For now I’ve moved on from my dreams of being a part of the USOC or the IOC - I've refocused my career goals to work with academic organizations. This Olympics, I am enjoying coming home from work and watching NBC’s primetime four hours of Olympic Coverage, following along on Twitter and Instagram and generally enjoying the national pride that comes along with the Olympic Games. I hope that the 2024 Summer Olympics will be in Los Angeles, because it would be a dream come true to be able to go to actual events. It’s not likely that my love for the Olympics will ever fade and I hope to someday watch my future kids fall in love with them as much as I have.